Quest and Tillie

Chapter 21: What I Was Going To Do

When I first fell in love with Quest Sullivan, I was a teenage girl whose heart was instantly attracted to the sweet, serious boy who was already built like a man, and that attraction quickly became love. We'd been together no more than two weeks before Quest told me he'd fallen in love with me, and I was so relieved to hear him say that because I'd been falling in love right along with him, too. After that moment, we were inseparable.

We grew up together, Quest and I, our identities closely entwined, so much so that our classmates and friends jokingly called us Quillie or Test. It made me laugh and made Quest roll his eyes, but despite the teasing, where I was, Quest was. He walked me to every class, sometimes having to sprint through the halls to get to my classroom, but he always did it, and his smile, the one that was solely for me, would break across his face the minute he caught sight of me.

"There's my girl," he'd always say, and I'd always say back, "Here I am."

Every Monday, he brought me wildflowers, and every Friday he took me out to eat and I felt like the luckiest, most-loved girl in the world with those serious eyes of his on me.

The day we married, he leaned over to me when I made it up to the altar, his eyes crinkled at the corners, and he whispered, "I was worried you wouldn't show up."

And that caused me to burst out laughing in front of all of our guests because everyone, Quest included, knew how much I loved him.

When he cheated on me, it burst my whole world wide open and suddenly, I didn't know who he was. I didn't know who I was. I didn't know anything because everything I thought I knew was upside down and seemed to be a lie.

How could Quest love me if he cheated on me? I found there were two very distinctive schools of thought on that. One being if he cheated, he couldn't possibly love me. The other being, he made a horrible choice and betrayed me, but that didn't mean he didn't love me. Good people can do bad things and make terrible choices. That didn't wipe out his feelings for me and it didn't have to erase our years of history together. 

I worked through that in individual therapy and then in marriage counseling with Quest. He'd worked just as hard on himself to understand why he'd cheated, to figure out what triggered him, made him snap and do something I never thought Quest Sullivan, my husband, the man I'd loved for years, would do. Something he never thought he'd do.

And yet, he had, forever altering the landscape of our life together.

The truth was, we'd be working through his betrayal for a long time to come. There would be days when I didn't look at him and think Cheater! There would be other days when I looked at him and saw the man who betrayed me, and I wanted to cry again about what he'd done and walk away. There were days when his smile was easy, and it was my smile again, the one only I got from him. There would be other days when Quest was out of smiles, and I knew the remorse and guilt were eating at him. On our off days, we gave ourselves space and time apart to think and reflect...and hurt. And then we talked it all out, no hiding anything, so the good, the bad and the ugly came out. Our road, as Ellis had warned us, still wasn't straight and was often riddled with potholes, but honesty and communication were key to navigating the path we were on.

But now, a little more than two-and-a-half years since he'd cheated on me, and the last year-and-a-half spent dating each other, we knew about each other in a different way, a way that felt more mature. We'd known each other as our youthful selves that we carried over into our marriage years. The year we'd spent apart, we'd begun the healing process by learning to make our way as individuals, pursuing new and old interests. We'd been married, but we'd been married with the love we'd created and built since we were in high school and we'd developed some bad habits that we were unlearning and developing new, healthy patterns of being a couple.  

"I feel like I did in high school, Tillie," Quest said one night when we were leaving his fight hand-in-hand. 

"How's that?" I asked.

"Humbled. Grateful that the most amazing, incredible girl in school was willing to give me the time of day."

At that I laughed. "I was nowhere near the most amazing or incredible girl in school," I scoffed.

"You were to me. Still are. You could have had any guy but you chose me."

I thought of my anxiety, my shyness and marveled at how Quest had seen me, how he'd seen past all that and hadn't let it deter him from asking me out. We'd been such babies back then who knew nothing of life; we knew only the giddiness of our young love and nothing of the difficulties ahead of us, no idea how our love would be tested.

And how it would fail.

We still lived separately and planned to maintain our own places for the foreseeable future.

"I'm in no rush, Til," Quest said. And he wasn't. Ellis had warned us that the cheater often wanted to bypass the reconciliation process, but Quest wanted to make sure we didn't skip over anything.

"We need to build this relationship so it's what we want it and need it to be," he said to me. 

Ellis told us to expect our post-cheating relationship to look and feel different, and she was right. I was stronger this time. I was almost done with my Physical Therapy Assistant program and then I would be embarking on an entirely new career I'd never imagined before. I had dated other men in that year we'd spent apart, some good, some not so good, but they didn't hold my interest. Quest was no longer the husband I expected to shoulder everything, to protect me and to treat me like a pampered princess. I'd stood on my own, lived by myself, and achieved some dreams I'd never really known I had, like school and a job that truly interested me.

And Quest had learned to share his thoughts with me about even the worrisome things. He no longer kept things to himself to shield me from worry. If there was something to concern us, we worried together. He was more partner and less protector now, and we'd moved our marriage from an individual sport to a team sport.

The trust between us, well, that was a process to rebuild it. But we were working on it and chipping away at it every day. Him being on his phone and worrying about him being out weren't really triggers for me because he hadn't done any of that and he still didn't. It was work that occasionally made me panic, and whenever I made a FaceTime call during the day to him, he answered immediately and did a full sweep of the area. Did I really think he'd cheat on me again? No. But sometimes I got triggered and needed reassurance, and he always took his time with me and we talked through it.

"You're going to get tired of this," I said to him once, and his face got angry.

"I got no right to be defensive, Tillie, when I'm the one who shook your foundation. Whatever you need, I'll do. I don't care if you call every five minutes. I'll take your calls whenever you call and however often you call. If you needed to sit and watch me work all day to reassure you, I'd get you a chair."

One day he picked me up to go out to dinner.

"Where are we going?" I asked when he started driving away in the opposite direction of the restaurant we'd talked about going to.

"Finished the house," he said. "Got the certificate of occupancy today, so you can close this week or next. Wanted you to see it so you can start thinking about what you want to do with it."

Ever since he'd told me he was building a house for me and I could do whatever I wanted with it, I'd never really asked about it, about the progress, and he hadn't really said much of anything about it.

Fifteen minutes later, we pulled up a gravel driveway and I looked at the white house with navy blue shutters and a navy blue front door. It was beautiful, this house. Quest had worked hard on it, and I knew why. It was one promise he'd made to me that he was determined to keep. It was a way to show me that he wasn't going to let me down in all ways. 

While he gave the tour of the four-bedroom house to me, an idea began to form after watching his face for a while. I'd been trying to get a bead on how he felt about the house, but he wasn't giving much away. Finally, I just asked him straight out how he felt about the house, and he'd been honest. Then I shared how I felt about the house with him.

It was then I knew exactly what I was going to do with this house that Quest built for me.